Xenu Next Generation Home Platform
Based on the excellent work by @onedr0p in home-ops and cluster-template community.
Originally, I wanted to deploy the cluster onto my bare metal k8s nodes, but due to limitations in Talos Linux related to volume management, I decided to run Talos in VMs.
Once Talos matures and allows for better volume management, I may revisit this. Target: Talos v1.10.
I used my existing Ansible setup in another repo to provision a new Proxmox cluster across the 3 cluster nodes.
I decided to keep using ingress-nginx until Gateway API matures.
I had a great experience with Traefik in my non-k8s environment, so that's another option as well.
- Talos Linux - API-driven, Kubernetes-focused Linux distribution
- Flux - continuous delivery via a GitOps model
- SOPS combined with age - secrets management
- cloudflared - provision Cloudflare Tunnels for publicly exposed endpoints
- external-dns - on-demand DNS record provisioning inside Samba (Active Directory) DNS with Kerberos auth
- Longhorn - cloud-native distributed block storage for Kubernetes
- CloudNativePG - deploy HA PostgreSQL clusters on K8s with ease
- postgres-operator - operator to manage DBs and roles
| Name | Model | CPU | RAM | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| tinynode01 | ThinkCentre M920q Tiny | i5-8600T (6c/6t/9MB) | 32 GB DDR4 3200 | Samsung 980 Pro 2TB NVMe |
| tinynode02 | ThinkCentre M920q Tiny | i5-8600T (6c/6t/9MB) | 32 GB DDR4 3200 | Inland Performance Plus 1TB NVMe |
| tinynode03 | ThinkCentre M920q Tiny | i5-8600T (6c/6t/9MB) | 32 GB DDR4 3200 | Solidigm SSDPFKKW010X7 1TB NVMe |
The 3 M920q nodes were purchased from eBay for around $300. Similar models can routinely be found (as of March 2025) for a similar price. Some of the other parts, like SSDs and some of the RAM, were scavenged from my inventory. Nevertheless, I am listing the BOM with estimated costs for planning purposes.
| Item | Model | Unit Cost | Source | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Compute Node | ThinkCentre M920q Tiny | $100 | eBay | Excellent condition |
| 32 GB DDR4 RAM | Crucial CT2K16G4SFRA32A | $45 | Best Buy (Sale) | Already had one kit |
| 1 TB NVME | Inland Performance Plus 1TB NVMe | $69.99 | MicroCenter | 700TBW endurance |
| 10 GbE NIC | SuperMicro AOC-STGN-I2S Low Profile | ~$18 | eBay | 3D printed a custom baffle |
| 1.5M DAC Cables | SFP-H10GB-CU1.5M Cisco Compatible | $11 | eBay (Private Label Networks) |
- STH Forum: Lenovo Project TinyMiniMicro Reference Thread
- github.com/a-little-wifi/Tinyriser open-source PCIe riser for Lenovo 8/9th gen Tiny PCs